Blog Traffic

December 19, 2005

The limited impact of Blakely in Apprendi-land

Back in August, as detailed here and here, the New Jersey Supreme Court in Natale applied Blakely to the state's presumptive sentencing scheme and then adopted its own version of the Booker remedy by making the state's sentencing scheme advisory rather than mandatory. Today, in this effective article, the Asbury Park Press reports the unsurprising news that, in the wake of Natale, most state resentencings have left original sentences undisturbed:

Those who work in the criminal justice system, including judges, attorneys and corrections officers — who must transport the defendants from state prisons to the courthouses where they were originally sentenced — have been expending time and resources on the resentencings that, for the most part, are resulting in prison terms that are unchanged.

"They come here fascinated, thinking, "We're going to get our sentences reduced,' Deputy Public Defender Frank Gonzalez said of the defendants who have been brought back to court in Ocean County to be resentenced. "It has not been as fruitful or beneficial to the defendants as we had anticipated," said Gonzalez, who oversees the Public Defender's Office in Ocean County. "The bottom line is, we have not gotten much out of these resentencings, if anything at all."